From my diary

Just a brief note to say that my hand injury is gradually improving, and that I hope to be able to do some blogging reasonably soon.  My apologies for the silence.

I’ve not been able to do any translating.  In fact I find that I’m starting to miss working on the Life of John Damascene.  But that involves quite a bit of mouse action – which hurts my hand -, so it may have to wait awhile.

However I have continued reading a psalm on Sunday and then the same psalm in the parallel Vulgate Latin and Douai-Reims English.  I really recommend this as a way to improve your Latin.  For each short psalm, the Latin has one less-than-obvious phrasing, which makes you think, and prepares you for the same stuff in medieval Latin.  So expect more posts about incidental matters of this kind.

Apparently Amazon claims that we don’t own the e-Books that we pay them for.  It’s curious to learn that a vendor can make such decisions, and never mind law or justice.  This year I learn that some countries have started to ban access to various illegal book sites, where one may download the same books without payment.  I wonder whether a collection of books downloaded in this way would actually indeed form part of the estate of the downloader!

I’ve read quite a bit of the Letters of A. E. Housman, as selected by Henry Maas – I nearly put Paul Maas! – but most seemed of no real interest today.  He must have been a terror to deal with, though.  His notes to his publisher are words of command, not of entreaty.  A very unhappy man, I suspect.  But then, good as the poetry is, I didn’t much care for A Shropshire Lad.